Reviews by MathBrush

This game was a bit different than I thought it would be, and I wasn't sure how some parts of it would work, but it gelled well together and I had a great time with it.

Specifically, I thought this would be mostly about a giant mech war. Instead, this is mostly about a 'fish out of water' scenario where you, an accidental time traveler, end up in the 12th century Middle East (Aleppo, Jerusalem, Jericho, etc.) in an alternate world where perpetual motion exists and powers giant mechs.

The game covers a lot of ground, from finding your place in the world (I became a squire) to dealing with intrigue and romance (I romance a knight named Ygrite) to mech combat and a surprisingly complex castle management simulator.

Each part felt just a bit thin, but as an overall whole it worked well. What's best is the way the stats tied in well with roleplaying. In a lot of Choicescript games I have to constantly check the stat screen to have any chance of succeeding. In this game, I just picked a character type I wanted to be and the options were so natural I didn't have to check the stat screen until the end. I failed a few times in reasonable ways, but was able to achieve most of my goals.

So I can definitely recommend this as an overall great experience. The combat isn't the best combat, the management isn't the best management, etc. but the overall way it comes together is some of the best I've seen.

As a side note, it includes several things I don't see much in Choicescript games, including a choice of religions and how religious you want to be and a variety of options related to drinking and food.

This is the last of Groover's exceptional stories that I've played. This one is very large, taking me up to around 80 actions to complete.

In many ways, this mirrors Cricket, Anyone?. Both stories are quite large. Both have fairly silly premises (a last-minute cricket player replacement vs curing a rhyming disease with a mushroom-hunting pig). Both end up uncovering a side-conspiracy that would be a main theme in other stories but is only a sideshow here (Benthic vs Somerset in Cricket and the truth behind the auction in MKfaP), and both end in a wild descent into non-reality uncovering vast truths about the Bazaar.

This is a great story. It has a lot of customization (you have several companions with different dialogue snippets and must choose between which ones to take), interesting mechanics (like bidding at an auction and a portion told entirely through red-bordered cards), connections to past actions (Poet-Laureate gets checked here, as does knowledge of the Khanate, connections to the Gracious Widow, and much much more), and great lore (you can learn intriguing details about the fall of each of the five cities).

I prefer Cricket, Anyone? marginally, but this story is better than almost all others. Flint was my touchstone for a long time on what a good side story should be, and it's intended to be much bigger and wilder than the Exceptional Stories, but I think this story plus Cricket, Anyone? provide better storylines and lore rewards than Flint (although significantly less financial rewards). Worth buying at the full Fate price.

This was a really hard game to rate, as I went back and forth between 4 and 5 stars. It's definitely one of the best Choicescript games I've given 4 stars, and I think the rating comes down to my experiences with it.

In this game, you play a fox in a Japanese-themed culture whose family is slaughtered by a vicious farmer. When you reach 100 years old, you gain the power to be a fox spirit.

Choices in the game generally revolve around your personality (helpful vs demonic is a big one) and whether you encourage war or not. There are several competing goals (immortality, peace, and romance) and I'm not sure you can complete all 3 at once (I ended up with 2).

The writing is engaging, but a lot of it depends on how interested you are in being a fox. Having seen fox spirits as enemies in other games, I found it fun to be one in this game.

I had trouble engaging with the stats, though. I had very high cleverness but kept failing stat checks about knowing things or being smart. Then near the end I realized that most of those checks were for 'worldliness', which was low for me as I was a godly disciple of Inari. Even after I figured that out, though, there were many many times where I had no clue what was being checked or failed things I thought I'd be great at. Part of that is probably because I was trying at first to be a devout trickster, but most trickster options lower devoutness. So I think my own choices led to that lack of engagement.

The game had a great sense of being an animal in the human's world, which is its best aspect.

I wouldn't have minded having stats look higher, too. Since every choicescript game is different, it's hard to tell if you are good at something if you have, for instance, a 65 in that category. But that's just personal taste.

Overall, well-written and a truly fun set of final chapters. It felt large, and reminded me of the setting of Choice of Kung Fu (which I think also featured Fox Spirits; they'd make a fun session played one after the other).

This the third Exceptional Story of Groover's that I've played, and I definitely liked this one more than most Exceptional Stories.

In this one, you become entangled in a slug race which, due to the nature of slugs, takes over a month to finish. In the meantime, you must travel all over London to interfere with the race, investigate the mysterious woman behind the race who always plays tango music, and look into the backgrounds of the competitors.

The game was quite a bit longer than I expected, with an extended opening, three phases of the race with two different activities in each phase, and a long and moving finale.

The rewards were good, the lore about hell and the Carnelian coast was good, and the slugs were excellent. Also, I enjoyed having an option to 'Fight the lettuce'. Definitely recommend this one.

This is the first of four Chandler Groover exceptional stories I purchased for research for my new game (I've played his other story Paisley already).

Exceptional Stories are mini-games built into Fallen London's overarching scheme. They tend to have both in-game rewards and interesting storylines.

This one starts off well enough, though not entirely exciting. It's mostly hunting various monsters throughout London with a lot of Groover-esque mentions of food or eating until you end up finding and interrogating a suspect.

I thought it was a bit short but well-done, and then I discovered that that was only half the story. The rest takes you out of London and uses some unique mechanics, bizarre rewards, and difficult choices.

The Lore was good, the related art and the ideas behind the items given were good. It wasn't as good as Paisley (which makes sense, given the time frames) but is better than most exceptional stories.

Worth playing for the memorable monster in the second half and the rewards, especially if you are an early player (if not, you may be more interested in the Lore-heavy option that forfeits those rewards).

This is one of my favorite recent exceptional stories.

There are rumours of a special race going around Fallen London, where only the best captains are invited. Surprisingly, you aren't invited, but you know who is, and you discover a bizarre plot.

This story excelled at two things. First, it really uses your traits. I had a Zubmarine, a Hell's Hymn, successful terms as governor, and a monster hunter's harpoon, two things that take quite a lot of work to get, and the game incorporated both beautifully into the story. Many other things I did not have were also incorporated into the story.

Second, it is strongly connected to Sunless Sea. The race course passes by all of the major near-London locations from that game, so seeing the Sphynxes and the Iron Republic was nice.

The story was very lengthy, had memorable characters, and had some of those GO NORTH-like options (i.e. really bad ideas) Fallen London is known for.

Might be worth becoming an exceptional friend this month, as I think it's cheaper than just buying the story.

This game was created as part of an MFA in writing at the University of Pittsburgh, where it was accepted as part of the program’s requirements, the first time a game has been accepted as part of their requirements. The author has also taught classes in Narrative Design in Twine.

This is a huge Twine game. The main idea is that you experience randomly-selected stories, and in between them a greater story builds up. You must acquire certain attributes or tokens to sell to advance.

This game correlates well with my experience of the academic environment vs submitting a game for evaluation by the wide world through publication or (in this case) IFComp.

The academic ‘audience’ is typically 4-5 people, the members of your committee. If its anything like math, the committee will likely spend very little time looking at your work, trusting perhaps your supervisor who has had weekly meetings with you to assure you that the work is high quality. For this game, I suspect the committee likely played for a few minutes until a death happened. In this environment, appearing to be a big time investment is the main goal, and appearing to be deep is another (which this game accomplishes by referencing racism and misogyny).

In the ‘open world’, though, other things are valued much more, #1 of which is a lack of bugs and typos, of which this game has many. For a large game entered into the competition, it needs far more testing, and hopefully publishing a proofing copy on Twinery and running it through grammarly or hiring an editor.

The game also uses very slow text in the middle. It features an undo feature which is very helpful, but if you reach a segment where you have to pay more tokens, even very late in the game, and you die, there is no choice but to restart, playing through the entire game.

I definitely think this work is valuable and I think that this is worthwhile to make, but it’s difficult to please two groups of people at once, and making a game that appeals to a wide audience is something that takes practice and a lot of help from others.

-Polish: Needs more polish.
+Descriptiveness: The game was very descriptive.
+Interactivity: This was good for the most part; the tokens are what got me.
+Emotional Impact: This game made me think a lot about my own past in academia.
-Would I play again? No, it felt a little too dificult to go far and the tone of some of the segments left me cold.

I played this game over a week before writing this, but put off reviewing it. It’s because I really enjoyed the concept, but found it very buggy (such as every important object being listed in the room as ‘You see…here’ or having scenery objects be takable).

I sent a list of possible bug fixes to the author, who took it under advisement, and tried playing it again.

I really enjoyed this game. You play as the assistant to a magician who was been kidnapped by a logician who leaves clues for you scattered around a mansion. Along the way, you encounter a whacky set of characters and bizarre magical implements.

The overall structure resembles Karella’s other games, but this is the first Glulx one. So there are still some iffy spots, but that’s to be expected: getting all the bugs out of an Inform game takes a long time and a lot of testing. But the writing was funny, the puzzles were generally well-clued and involved very creative concepts (more in the items used than the puzzle structure itself). and I think that overall this was great.

I wasn’t sure about whether I felt good or bad about a certain Christian clown in the game, as it seems generally mocking but presents him as sincere, so I’m on the fence about that. Otherwise, I heartily recommend this game.

++++Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional Impact, Would I play again? Yes, yes, yes, and yes
-Polish: Could use some more!

So, I have played Fallen London for years, and am especially fond of Sunless Seas and Sunless Skies. I also did my dissertation in geometry and am a fan of Flatland. So I definitely think I was the target audience of this game, which is essentially all of the important locations of Fallen London but flat.

The game is quite large, and has a Zork-like structure where you put treasures in a trophy case. There are plenty of locations, people and items.

This game is centered on parser structure, Fallen London lore, and geometry. I want to talk about what worked well and less well for me personally in each area.

What worked well with the parser: The puzzles are clean and solvable, usually, with few red herrings. I had a couple of disambiguation issues (especially with books and with the chess set) but very few if any genuine bugs. Interaction with NPCs generally worked well, always a hard thing to do. The piano puzzle was great.

What worked less well with the parser: The puzzles could use a little more creativity. Many of them are just ‘take the object’ or ‘follow the instructions here’. On the other hand, the chess puzzle was, as your testers indicated, perhaps too hard. It might have been worth giving a visual interpretation or even having a scrawled note in the chess handbook that says what the ‘real meaning’ of rule 1 is so people know they’re supposed to translate the rules and use them.

What worked well with Fallen London: This was clearly written by either a fan of the game or someone a lot of time to browse the wiki (or both?). Locations seem true to form, from poking around in the banks of the river to the exhibits in the Labyrinth of tigers to the expeditions in the Fallen Quarter.

What worked less well with Fallen London: Fallen London relies almost entirely on atmosphere and on the idea that there are forbidden secrets just around the corner. This game reveals many of the secrets of Fallen London, so many that I would almost recommend people not play it if they plan on getting into Fallen London and want to have more surprises. This has a second negative effect, which is that by revealing so much of the secrets at once, they’re deprived of their power, and the impact of the setting is lessened. Likewise, the game lacks the lush descriptions of Fallen London.

What works with geometry: Things like the elevator shaft work very well and the endings. But otherwise the 2-dimensionality is not used very much. How are murals drawn? How do locks work? How can the sigils be drawn as (presumably) 1-dimensional paint? How can you bridge a river without blocking its flow?

So I think this game has a lot of positives, but that it could make use of its three sources a little bit more.

+Polished: Mostly so.
-Descriptive: The writing is, well, somewhat flat.
+Interactivity: There was generally always something available to do.
-Emotional impact: I didn't feel emotionally invested in the game.
+Would I play again? After I've had enough time to forget the solutions, yes.

Well, my personal shuffle lined up for me three pretty hefty games that I beta tested all in a row. But fortunately they’re all fun to play.

This is a big game, longer than 2 hours for me (I only replayed the first 2 ‘acts’ for this review). It’s basically the ancient rituals of the Eleusinian Mysteries (as far as we’ve recreated them) retold in the style of P.G. Wodehouse.

The game is split up into 4 or 5 acts. Each is large enough to be an IFComp game in its own right, especially the first act (which involves searching for items in an expansive map) and the last act (which is a madcap action scene set in a single room and involving a form of optimization).

The game provides a ton of jokes and just text in general, with full-screen text printouts being a regular occurrence. Overall, it’s a masterpiece in terms of total content and polish.

Structure-wise, I found the open-world segments more effective than the narrowly constrained 2nd act. Quite a few of the puzzles were more difficult than I could handle, as well, with my typical loose and easy playstyle. For the thoughtful and methodical player that examines every item, carefully checks exits and works through every takable object, this game will exciting and rewarding. For everyone else, like me, the hints are quite good and let you see the witty writing more easily.

+Polish: For a game this large and complex, it is very polished.
+Descriptiveness: The witty writing is a plus.
-Interacivity: For me, the puzzles were too hard to figure out easily.
+Emotional impact: This game is funny, for sure.
+Would I play again? After the comp is over, I'd like to revisit this.